Although I don’t remember the contributors, the flow of the discussion is as clear as if it happened yesterday. The steady professor was quietly putting an argument in place, on the Today program on Radio 4, to suggest that the warming of the earth may be due to factors such as cloud formation due to solar activity when he was rudely, and I do mean rudely, interrupted by the green activist smearing his comments and shouting him down.

That was the exact moment a few years ago when I knew that Man Made Global Warming wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I do not consider myself to be an idiot and I think that I have read fairly widely but I am not a scientist, I do not understand all the research, I was until that point unconvinced but concerned. Not being a monster my feelings are that we need to leave the earth in better condition than we find it. That’s not to say that I think we should waste all our GDP on trying to save every species but that I do think we have a duty to be fair to those who come after us. I don’t agree with needless commercial materialism, it consumes resources which could be better used elsewhere.

What I have learned and you would do well to learn if you haven’t yet is that the attitude of the debater is often as clear an indication of truth as the so-called facts which are presented. Those old enough to remember the wild-eyed man on the high street calling time on civilisation will also remember how each and every person correctly ignored him and his theory, the end was not close to nigh. There is a rare time for shouting and closing down debate but this was not it.

I still do not know for sure if we are causing Global Warming but I now strongly suspect that we are not. Recent experiments at CERN and data from BEST suggests that maybe the professor was right and that the activists have fudged the data for whatever benefits and reasons seemed good to them. I may well have believed them if it wasn’t for that activist but for what I will call ‘the wrong type of shouting’ test. I wonder how many others are attuned to this truth and which other issues can be resolved by the same reasoning?